Developing your point of sale app and increasing your offering from hardware to a complete integration sounds tempting initially. But there are many nitty-gritty details involved in this approach.

The point of sale app is a mission-critical and large-scale application where much business logic is written on the app side. This increases the overall complexity of the app. Hence, Addressing the POS app project as a normal application development project might not be an accurate approach.

With my experience of 8+ years in developing point-of-sale software from scratch I’m putting this article together to help ISVs, ISOs, and VARs in building their own POS app.

I follow these 12 steps to completely Discover,Design,Develop and Deploy a POS Software which i call“The Bliss Way”

Stay Blissed, Life is not for Stress.

1. Finalize the Platform: Windows,IOS or Android?
2. Figure out end users of your POS Software.
3. Dev Team: In House or Outsource?
4. Build “The List” : A giant list of the features.
5. Finalize Development Phases based on “The List”.
6. Onboard UI/Ux Engineers and Start preparing wireframes
7. Divide phases in Milestones.
8. Prepare and Beta Release the MVP.
9. Implement Beta feedback and Improvise phase 1 product.
10. Go to the market & Switch your existing loyal customers to use your pos.
11. Wait for their feedback and References.
12. Repeat the cycle for each phase.

Each and every point is very important there can be a seprate article for each point. To give you proper overview of each point i’ll divide this in series of articles.

1. Finalize the Platform: Windows,IOS or Android?

As i said earlier, POS is a Mission-Critical software. Meaning user is dependent on the software for day to day operations of their business. If POS software goes down it’ll create a havoc situation for the restaurants.

This makes it super important to choose the right platform for your users.

In my opinion, Windows is a complex OS because it is built for more complex things like computers and servers. If something goes wrong with the setup or something you’ll need someone from your team to remotely connect to one of their pos devices to help them.

Whereas Android/IOS is more like a mobile OS. It’s easy to DIY in Android/IOS. For example, If a customer needs to connect wifi printer all you have to do is ask them to turn on wifi in their pos and enter the IP address of the printer. But with Windows, you’ll ask them to install drivers first, then open pos, check firewall settings for the printer’s port, and many other steps.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not usable. Sometimes, If your customer is already invested big into Windows and their staff is used to the same OS they can adapt to the Windows pos also without any issues.

This depends entirely on the cases of your core users. Which is why the next step is most important.

2. Figure out end users of your POS Software

POS is not the kind of software that can adapt to every business verticals out there. For instance, A POS doing good for Cafe might not be that much fluent for a pizzeria.

Before you plan the development you’ll need to figure out who your audience is and which sub — vericle you want to cater more. If you’re an ISO, ISV, Or even a VAR that means you already have some customers out there.

Talk to them, Try to understand what they are not able to do currently with their existing pos systems.

Usually, ISOs and ISVs forward these insights to their end-user sharing with the other POS software companies with which they are associated. This is helping them sharpen their products.

Why not build your own POS instead of helping others fix theirs? You might find an answer in the next step.

3. Dev Team : In House or Outsource?

Let’s address the elephant in the room.

How to hire a great and autonomous Dev team for your pos project?

If you’re okay with the cost of having an in-house dev team then It can be a very helpful approach. You should only go with in house dev team if you can,

• Invest time in Technologies
• Provide required infrastructure
• Invest more in Salaries
• Hire project managers and engineers

Building a team is never easy, But what if you can collaborate with someone who already did this and built the team, and their day-to-day job is to build softwares? This is where Outsourcing comes into action,

Hiring a remote and autonomous team somewhere in Asia or Europe can help you focus on your core business and someone else can take care of technicalities for you.

Here are the benefits of outsourcing to the right team,

• You can start work on your project immediately
• Good talents at an effective cost.
• Saves you time, money and efforts
• You can focus on business where you’re good at
• Technically if you want you can hire people from two different time zones and you can have a 24×7 working team.

Finding a good team to outsource is not as easy as it sounds. Many times these dev agencies work on multiple projects at the same time and may make false promises to you. Another common issue many of my client complains about is they are receiving low-quality code base from agencies making it overall costly to manage software.

POS is by nature a very large application project. The last thing you’ll want is a low quality of code and false promises. But that’s the world, right? It’s not nessasory that we’ll find good people every time. We need to learn how to navigate through these things confidently.

Based on my experience, Here’s how you can stay a step ahead of the dev team,

• Document everything. Every single requirement should be in writing.
• Always be available for discussions. Make sure they understand things properly.
• If at any stage you feel that the team is unable to grasp your vision. Take everything from them and switch to another team immediately. You don’t want stressful days for the next couple of years.
• Always ask the UI/UX engineer to prepare wireframes first, Make it clear that you don’t want to be development started without wireframes.
• Ask them to present you with daily updates. Ask them that you’ll only take updates from the person with whom you talked during initial discovery.
• Hire an individual freelancer(2-3 hours) from your home country and ask him/her to do code reviews for you.
• Ask them to onboard you to their Slack channels and JIRA boards.
• Ask for a Demo every two weeks.
• If any delays in plans, Ask for the next plans from their side.
• Avoid Fixed-price contracts if possible. Later dev teams will realize they haven’t provided proper estimation and to cut losses they’ll start degrading quality. Large software is very difficult to estimate.

Following above points will make it a bliss for you to manage your development cycle while getting your own pos app developed.

What’s Next

In the next article, I’ll give you over view of the giant list of features that we call“The List”and how you can leverage this approach to plan your own point of sale app development project. Make sure you press that little follow button to receive updates.

Save your time!

Do you want to hire someone who can do all this for you and can deliver a complete Point of sale application, End to End? Check out our dedicated development services and book a free consultation call to know more.